Synthesys, Digital Reasoning’s machine learning platform that ferrets out meaning in unstructured data at scale, is bringing its smarts to compliance use cases for organizations, such as financial institutions. (See this article for more insight into the technology behind the company’s software.)

This week, the vendor delivered Version 3.7 of the Synthesys software, which brings with it the capability to monitor and analyze all email communications in near real-time. That matters to many compliance program use cases, among them insider trading, money laundering and reputation management. “They all go back to finding information inside of communications, like who are the people and organizations mentioned in email, and what is being discussed about them,” says Tim Estes, chairman and CEO. “Synthesys can take essentially millions of emails and winnow them to maybe a hundred that are problems.”

That means fewer things are falsely flagged as issues, there’s less privacy treading into innocent emails, and there’s more return on time for the people charged with protecting customers and enforcing compliance requirements.

Estes says it’s become a C-level, and board-level, imperative in the financial industry to have “a deeper and more proactive solution on compliance, and one that can scale up to Big Data. That hasn’t existed.” A typical approach, when a concern presents itself, is to draw up keyword lists, which can get pretty massive, and hope you’re guessing all the ways people might say refer to something that might cross a compliance boundary, and be prepared to wade through a whole lot of emails that turn out to be harmless. (For example, Estes says, you might turn up emails referring to employees as assets, rather than the ones about an M&A that unfortunately blab about the potential acquiree’s assets.) E-discovery tools, he adds, offer cool technology to help but are generally designed to analyze information in reaction to an issue.